White Heat

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White Heat Page 36

by Melanie McGrath


  Inuktitut both supports and reflects the Inuit world- view. It is highly relational and tends to deal in the concrete rather than the abstract, shying away from generic nouns. In their traditional hunting culture, it was less useful to Inuit to know there were fish in a river as to know exactly what species of fish and in which part of the river they were to be found. Place names, too, tend to be specific and functional. Inuit call Ellesmere Island Umingmak Nuna or Musk-Ox Land to signal to themselves and to future generations that the island is a place where musk ox can be found and hunted. Even today, when new words have to be conjured, these have a concrete, descriptive quality. The word for computer, qarasaujaq, means 'something that works like a brain.' It is, however, a myth that the Inuit have hundreds of words for snow. In fact they have about the same number of 'root' words for snow as Indo-European languages but the nature of Inuktitut means that to describe what we might call 'frosty, sparkling snow,' Inuit can use a single poly- synthetic word, patuqun.

  Spoken Inuktitut makes a soft, rippling sound, like water running over pebbles in a brook. It is unusual for Inuit to raise their voices and it's considered rude to ask direct questions. Edie Kiglatuk is an exception to this, which may partly explain why she is such an outsider in her own world.

  Sadly, some Inuktitut dialects are now in grave danger of disappearing. Where possible, I have tried to use the North Baffin or Qikiqtaalukuannangani versions of Inuktitut words in this book, but it is more than possible that some inconsistencies may have crept in, for which I can only apologize.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

 

 

 


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